AboutScott Valentine Expertise Author, "Real World Compositing with Photoshop CS4 (Peachpit)". Beginning to expert questions for Photoshop CS3 and CS4 Extended, including 3D capabilities. I am also an expert here for Digital Photography. Please - NO questions on Lightroom, Elements, Express or versions earlier than CS2. These questions will be discarded.
Experience Author, "Real World Compositing with Photoshop CS4" (available from Peachpit.com in January, 2009). I have been a professional level user since 1999, and have used Photoshop for photography, fine art, graphic design, web design, and technical image analysis. I have also conducted classes at the college level in both artistic and technical uses. I am currently an Adobe User Group manager.
Organizations National Association of Photoshop Professionals, Los Alamos Multimedia Users Group.
Publications CommunityMX.com, Real World Compositing with Photoshop CS4 (Adobe Press).
Education/Credentials Bachelor's degree, Physics
Awards and Honors Several awards for digital photography.
Question QUESTION: Hi. My client would like their images returned as 'cut outs', so they can simply drag and drop them to make a collage of their range.
I've got some one make a path around the object for me, then turned the path into a selection, and cut out the background. Then I've opened a new document which is transparent and dragged the object onto that.
Firstly, is this the best way to go about making a cut out? Secondly, I seem only to be able to save it as a PSD? I would like to return to my client a JPEG image of their product which has no background, if this is possible?
Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks
Rob
ANSWER: Depending on the complexity of the object and the type of edge between the subject and the area you want to remove, a path is usually the best place to start. There are many different approaches to making these selections, which would take more room to explain than we have here. You can also look at using tools like OnOne's MaskPro for making masks and complex selections.
Once the image is cut out, you will have to save it in a PSD format for future use and editing. To export it, you need to use a format that supports transparency, currently PNG or GIF (not many consumer tools properly support transparency or layers in TIFF). JPG does not support transparency.
Your client will need software than properly handles PNG or GIF image with transparency. For photographs, I recommend PNG-24 or 32, as the GIF palette is too small for photographic quality.
If you send a JPG, you can use a solid-color background, but not transparency.
I hope this helps - if you have further questions, please ask!
-Scott
---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------
QUESTION: Hi Scott, thanks for your quick response last time.
I now have my images of all the products (550 of them!) all with a clipping paths around and saved as JPEGS. My client would like to be able to open them and cut them out using the clipping path I've provided, onto transparancy so they can meake 'montages' of each product range, and change them as and when a new product comes in. However, they don't have any software for this, which software should I recommend? Can you do this in Photoshop Elements? I've never used it and don't know what features it has.
Any help would be greatly appreciated here!
Rob
Answer Hi Rob,
Unfortunately, I don't have any recommendations for you, as I stick pretty much to Photoshop so am not aware of capabilities in other packages. From a business standpoint, I do suggest that you consider talking with your client about you making the updates and changes yourself, though I recognize that the client may not be happy about that. However, that is why you were contracted in the first place - you can provide a service they need.
It's possible they can do what they need in something like Microsoft Word or Publisher, though my own experience with these applications tells me that the transparency issue will be hit-and-miss; some images may not show up properly, or will have odd artifacts in the transparent regions. This is really a job for a professional image application like Photoshop.
